Finding a place of reflection, looking for meaning in the middle of life. Making sense of the past, deciding how to greet the future, all the while discovering more of who we are and who we are meant to be. A living, breathing memoir of sorts.

Thursday, August 9, 2018

Piecing Together the Tapestry of Life

Have you ever felt like your life is segmented into pieces,
like you have the work part, the spouse part, and the family part? Sometimes
you find a few minutes to devote to the you part and do something you want or
need to do. All of these pieces of me require me to change hats, so to speak,
and become a different version of me to fit the occasion.

There are many days that I feel, as I’m sure you do, that the
pieces of me are pulling against each other threatening to pull me apart at the
seams. If life is a tapestry, sort of like the quilt-top that my Great-grandma
Pate constructed, then the purpose of my life is to put all those pieces of me
together in some sort of pattern, utilizing my past and my current relationships,
my thoughts, my dreams, and my beliefs to make up the quilt of my life.

In my book, Leave Him?, I talk about how I would have never
put the patterns and colors together in the way that my great-grandmother did
years ago. Anyone who knows me knows that I want things to be matchy- who would
dream of wearing navy blue shoes with a black outfit. It even bothers me when
my nail polish clashes, after all things must be perfect. My striving for
perfection doesn’t stop with my outer appearance- I naturally hold that
standard (one I can never measure up to) for all of the things in my life and
have to consciously fight to allow myself the grace to be less than perfect. A
half-century of failed attempts at perfection helps to push through to an
adjustment of standards.

I struggled with a way to end my memoir last year, because I
have not come close to figuring life out and summing it up in a ‘they lived
happily ever after’ sort of way. The quilt of my life contains many pieces of
fabric that I have had to learn to love and embrace, and there are still days
when I feel it is coming apart at the seams. If you decide to read my book you
will not find a tidy, how to live manual, but instead you will find stories
that illustrate a journey, sometimes sloppy, that is both distinctive and universal.
Most of all my desire when reading my book is that you would feel that it is
okay to not be okay as one of my favorite Christian music singers, Plumb says.
If you struggle with matchy perfectionism or feeling like you have blown it maybe
this is the book for you.

You can read my book for free with Kindle Unlimited or purchase
it at Amazon.com

About Me

I am currently in my third career as a high school English teacher in the small Georgia town that I grew up in. My first career was in journalism where I eventually started my own direct mail publication writing feature stories about businesses and a personal column, sharing insights into my life. After selling my paper, I embarked on my second career of spiritual counseling in an effort to find help for myself, and then to offer that help to others. I have learned much from life, but probably the most important thing is that people need to know that they are not alone in their struggles, and it is only by us daring to drop the mask of perfection and being real that we find true connection. This is my attempt to share my struggles, my failures, and my occasional triumphs to build a safe place to drop the masks we all wear and dare to be real.